Uhm, what did I do today? Not so much. Finished off that
GNOME
programming article and started touting it around. Then
worked a little
bit on the cookery thing.

Of course, that turned into another sidetrack; I wanted a
columned list
for the main recipe list, and it turned out that Gtk::CList
was a little
clunky. You have to store the data yourself, for instance,
since it's
tricky to get it back out of the object; it's more or less a
display-only thing. So, I wrote a little module I called
Gtk::HandyCList
which holds the table as part of its private data. I then
added some
bits so that when you click on column names, you get the
data sorted.
And then reverse sorted if you click on it again. And then
came a method
for specifying the size of the columns as a percentage, and
it just
carried on from there. Released it to CPAN about
lunchtime.

Another "is this a bug" day with Unicode stuff. People
didn't seem to
understand what use bytes does, which is
understandable; I
provided a bit more documentation. There was also a problem
that
print leaked UTF8; now I've "fixed" it so that if
we're not in
bytes, UTF8 is downgraded. I say "fixed" because
now saying
use bytes will make Perl print out the data in
UTF8, and saying
use utf8 will make it print it out as bytes.
That's, uh, confusing.

It's time to start this thing up again.
Today was reasonably productive, although not much. I wrote
some of the "Compleat Perl Internals" poem for the
conference on Saturday, and thought a little bit more about
my main talk.
Also did a bit of research on the Forking article, which is
coming along nicely now. Spent most of the morning looking
at a UTF8 bug unearthed by Gisle Aas, or rather, deciding
whether or not it was a bug. In fact, it turned up a
different bug, and when I looked into the source, I found
that it would work perfectly fine if it wasn't for a
&& 0 on the end of one of the
if statements. Do you get moments like that?
When you think, "why the hell did I put that there?
Did I put that there?".
The afternoon was spent looking for hotels in London for
the weekend. God bless the Web.
This evening, I started writing a Perl/GNOME tutorial.
Well, no, I didn't. I started off by wanting to
write a nice application to collect all my recipes, format
them out as TeX, and also give me the ability to say what
ingredients I had in and get back recipes I could
make. Then, for some bizarre reason, I decided it had to
have a GUI. No, I don't know why. So, I started looking at
Perl GNOME. Which didn't take long, as it has no
documentation at all. Which meant I had to write
some, naturally! I spent a while poring over the examples
and a few applications already out there, and started
piecing an article together. Don't hold your breath for it,
though. And don't hold your breath for the recipe
application, either. These sidetracks just roll on and
on...

Weekends are strange; I seem to have the ability to go
straight from Japanese time onto GMT. I woke up at about
5pm, which scuppered all chances of getting some writing
done. Caught up on news and email, and hacked a couple of
trivial Perl patches. Later on, I'll phone my friend Nik and
arrange lunch tomorrow. I'll also be writing until the small
(or probably relatively large) hours, unless I can find some
more nice distractions.

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